Problogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income is not your average get-rich-quick paperback. You won’t find any outrageous and sensational claims in this book. In fact, authors Chris Garrett and Darren Rowse are quick to make the point that blogging isn’t a magical cash cow but something that can fill your bank account only if you know your stuff. Then they proceed to teach you all the techniques they themselves have used to achieve wealth through blogging.

Making money from a blog is no different than any other career-you need the right tools and techniques in order to be successful. The book offers a very brief explanation of what blogging is then moves on to help you choose a topic that will draw in the traffic you need to make it profitable. You’ll also be taught how to properly set up a blog, making it visually appealing as well as interesting to your target audience.

Of course, marketing your blog is essential if you want to profit from it and Garrett and Rowse teach their readers how to analyze the market in order to take advantage of it. Unless you know how the market trends and what consumers need you won’t be successful no matter how good your blogging skills are! They then go on to teach you a number of ways to promote your blog. After all, without promotion the only traffic you’ll have is accidental surfers and that’s every blogger’s nightmare.

Blogging has been a favorite pastime among Internet enthusiasts. However, for someone who has a home based business online, you’ll know that having your own blog can enable you to earn money writing blogs. Once you keep your blog updated regularly with useful and interesting content based on your niche market it won’t be long before you start earning more than you’ve expected and gain more followers at the same time.

So how do you earn money writing blogs and make your blog more popular and profitable online? Here are 5 easy steps you can do turn it into the next big thing:

1. One of the biggest mistakes bloggers commit is taking their readers and followers for granted. Just because they’re here today doesn’t mean they’ll stay forever especially if you’re no longer sensitive towards their needs. You should come up with a tactic that will encourage your members and other online users to visit your blog regularly. For instance, you can ask for their suggestions or create a questionnaire. Those who’ve shared their ideas or answered the questionnaire can win a free gift through a raffle.

Getting your readers involved is one way to keep them coming back for more. Doing so makes them feel important and appreciated by you. Always think out of the box when coming up with ideas that are sure to help you gain followers in your blog.

2. Always have a catchy headline or title for your blog. Use strong words that can entice the readers to read what you’ve written. Remember that many readers are very impatient and they won’t even take time to read a whole article just to know whether or not it’s something worthy of their time. Instead, they read headlines or titles first. So if you can use one that is eye catching or thought provoking; it won’t be hard to get them reading.

Building a blog is probably going to be the easiest part of starting your online business, but marketing your blog is going to be considerably more difficult.

In order to be successful in internet marketing, you should do everything with both your reader and the search engines in mind. Everybody’s aim is to be on page one of the search engine results pages (SERPs) because theoretically that’s where you’ll make the most money. One of the many important things you will have to do to get your blog onto the first page of the Google SERPs is obtain backlinks.

The easiest way to get backlinks is by leaving comments on other people’s blogs. These blogs should be “Do Follow” blogs, which basically means that along with your name and an e-mail address you can leave a link to your site.

Below are our three main tips for better blog commenting:

1. You should leave useful and knowledgeable comments on other people’s blogs. The blogmaster is offering you something of value, i.e. the chance to gain a backlink, so you must leave a comment that adds value to his site in return. Leaving comments such as “great site dude” is of little value to the blog owner and will probably be deleted.

2. Make sure the blog where you leave your comment is relevant to your own website or blog. Google and the major search engines take this into consideration, and you will improve your ranking only if the blog is relevant. For example, if you have a site about dog training, its pointless leaving a comment on a site about flower arranging.

So you want to launch a blog for your business… what are you planning to post? What’s the purpose? 9 times out of 10, business owners jump headlong into business blogging with the idea that it’s going to generate business. That’s true in many cases but it’s not like unlocking your front door and letting customers in. Business blogging, like any part of content marketing, requires a sound strategy in order to generate a return. Understanding the 5 W’s of content marketing (and especially blogging) will help you focus your efforts and avoid some of the most common pitfalls.

• Why: Why are you creating content and going after business blogging in the first place?
• Who: Who are you writing content for? More importantly, who are you?
• What: What is it you want to achieve by writing and posting content online?
• When and How: When and how will you be creating the content?
• Where: Where are you going to post and share the content online?

These are all extremely important to refining and developing your business blogging strategy. Let’s take a look at each individual question.

1) Why are you creating content?

You need to understand your goals – not just in content marketing but overall. You should have existing goals in place in your business such as growth, new customer acquisition, improved brand visibility, etc. Are you creating content to work toward existing goals, to work toward new goals or are you just playing follow the leader because your competitors started business blogging campaigns.

2) Who are you writing content for?

So, you want to create your own online space but don’t know how to start blogging? With all the scripts and technology today, it’s easier than you think! Here are 7 steps to starting a blog that will get you going:

1. Decide What You Want Your Blog To Be About

The first thing you need to decide is what you will blog about. Do you want a general blog about your rants and raves? A blog about training your dog? A blog about your self-sustaining garden? Deciding on your topic is key because you will need to do some keyword research in order to find some good phrases to target as well as a good domain name.

2. To Host Or Not To Host

If you don’t have any money for starting a blog, then you can use free services like Blogger, free WordPress, Tumblr, Weebly or many of the other free platform. I don’t recommend this, however because at any time these services can remove your blog and all your hard work will be for nothing. The best route to take, especially if you plan to make money from your blog someday is to buy your own domain name and get your own hosting.

3. Get Your Domain Name

You want to choose a domain name that is relevant to your topic. Yes, I know that you’ve probably heard to get an “exact match” domain name based on a keyword phrase that you’ve decided is worthy of such, but they really aren’t as advantageous as they used to be so I wouldn’t worry about it too much. It’s much more important to find one that describes the general topic of your blog.

If you already know how to write a successful blog then you I don’t need to tell you how hard it can be if not then believe me when I say to you keeping your blog updated regularly isn’t easy. It’ll suck away your time like a 3 year old sucks an ice pop.

Before we move on to a few tips on how you can keep it up to date there is a pre requisite. You need to set a schedule on how often you’re going to post and you need to stick to it, it’ll be expected by your readers.

Now I know of a very successful blogger who completely goes against this but he’s an exception to the rule, he provides content far superior to most bloggers and states often that due to the nature of his posts it’s difficult to set a schedule.

So unless you’re intending on writing 3,000 plus word blog posts filled with pure content you need to set schedule. Your readers will expect it. When you move away from the normal routine and don’t post as often, you’ll lose readership.

If you start posting more often, your readership will take this as the norm and when you go back you’ll lose readers. So, I’ll say it again, stick to a schedule!

Now let’s get down to business. How to write a successful blog.

Finding The Time To Write.

Set yourself daily time to update your blog, or if you only update 3 time per week set specific days when you’re going to write your blog posts. If for some reason you know you can’t do it on that day do it earlier and put a time delay on your blog post to be released when it normally is.

The word blog is an acronym or an abbreviation for the phrase web log. Blogs are another imaginative means of information sharing on the internet. Blogs have become the average person’s approach to providing their own individual viewpoint to everyone as well as become a worldwide classroom from which the writer can instruct and impart wisdom and experience to their readers. It is a way of making your experience available to anybody who has an interest in looking at it.

Auto-blogging saves the blog writer time and continues to permit them to deliver articles for their blog regularly. By installing plug-ins on your blog it is refreshed automatically with content from other sources. A plug-in is a set of software components that adds specific competencies to a more robust software application. As an example, plug-ins are used in internet browsers to play videos or scan for ‘trojans’ – destructive programs that can steal information or harm a computer system.

In auto-blogging, a plug-in is set up that snags information from a variety of sources and puts it on a blog. The blog owner provides fresh articles, according to the boundaries in place, and saves time from actually undertaking any work.

Auto-blogging has started the dialogue concerning the legitimacy of this use of auto-blogs. The information produced by an auto-blog is reused content material. It takes another person’s work and puts it on a blog. Unless the original author is credited with producing the information, the information is technically ripped off. If the information is protected by copyright or not, is not the problem. The situation and complaint of individuals who have had their work appear on some other site or blog devoid of credit is the genuine dilemma. This gets to be especially important if the writer is using their blog to earn money.

Grammar and Spelling is important on your business blog, (or any blog for that matter) for several reasons. On a business blog, your blog content is a direct reflection of your Company. It corresponds directly with the products which you sell.

Regular readers seeing misspellings and typos will start to doubt your business savvy and knowledge solely based on this fact. If you can’t take time to correct common typos, perhaps you don’t really know the topics you are talking about.

First time visitors or people stopping by to browse your blog will get a bad overall “first impression” when landing on your blog post. If the post is full of typos and misspellings, they may stop reading, or their overall first impression won’t be good.

Sadly, they will more be apt to judge you based on the grammatical and spelling errors and not judge your overall expertise on whatever topic the business blog is based on. The sheer fact that you haven’t done your due diligence and checked your errors will point blank, jeopardize your readership.

Quite honestly, with modern technology, there’s no excuse for it. Most blogs have a built in spell check feature. If you are producing posts yourself, make sure to use a spell checker on your blog before publishing content-even if you have read or re-read your post several times. If this feature is slow or hard to use, then to alleviate any issues, you could simply write your posts in a Word document, spell check, then drop them into your blog. It is also important to check blog titles and keywords for grammatical errors.

Several of you have written asking me to share some of my ideas and tips about blogging, so here goes.

Observation leads me to believe many bloggers do not know a good sentence from a turnip. If I find myself rewriting someone else’s sentence instead of reading their blog, I quit reading.

Another observation I have made is many people who consider themselves writers do not know how to tell a story. Now, I am not talking about Mark Twain kinda’ storystelling, just the basics.

Writing is difficult-those who would have written “writing is hard”-just proved my point. The task is difficult; the object is hard-eighth grade English class.

If you want to write well, be prepared to work. One of my favorite sayings is “if I had more time I would have written less.”

My overriding rule to myself is not to be redundant. If all I am doing is writing about the same topic as others, or offering the same perspective, I am just wasting air. I go out of my way to be contrarian, and I do so for the same reason.

Just because Word or dictionary.com warns you that the word you just typed is not a word is irrelevant. If it helps tell the story, use it. Also, only people with small minds believe there is only one way to spell each word.

I write conversationally, and I do so purposefully. I find it helpful to use tools-analogies and allegories to tell a story, to set a stage, or to draw in the reader. I use other such devices, but I do not know the names of devices any more than I know participles.